At the Place of the Weeping Waters

In the original Quastrian, Abbadon might be perhaps more properly transliterated as Abdazon, the Place of the Weeping Waters. Thus was this settlement situated during the Second Age of Old Early Quatria.

Abdazon began as a small village at the foot of the Cyrcic Cleft, where the Weeping Waters poured out of the Hypogeum. The people fished in that river, and hunted in the lower remnants of the then Great Forest. And their position made them tenders of the way-point for those beings who flowed from time to time out of the current whose source lay somewhere hidden in the Hypogeum.

Hospitality for these visiting entities formed the basis of Abdazonian culture, and the city became a lively trading spot, with clear roads out to Sheb and the Cyrcic Sea, and the city of Hundredth, then capital of the House of Wealth.

As the people of Abdazon grew prosperous, they undertook massive earthwright projects, to raise a tall hill called Foot, a Stair rising up from it, and meeting an arching Bridge up to the plateau of the Cyrcic Cleft, alongside the upper falls of the Weeping Waters.

Though it took them generations to complete this project, it turned the one-way traffic out of the Hypogeum (by way of the Weeping Waters) into a two way channel which humans, beasts, and wagons could pass in either direction from the Lower Plain up to the Cyrcic Cleft, and thence onto the Safe Passage into the Hypogeum.

Thus during this time, men and entities of all kinds could traffic bodily between Quatria and the Hypogeum, and Abdazon grew in wealth and power. In time, the Rulers of Hundredth came even to pay tribute to the Merchants of Abdazon, and the capital of that House of Abundance shifted to the Place of the Weeping Waters.

All who commerced with Abdazon became themselves wealthy too, from Hundredth to Sheb (formerly a small fishing village — like so many in Quatria — which thereafter became a hub of sea-faring mariners), on up through the Threx Gate (the only other land passage to the upper level of the Cyrcic Cleft), to the city of Threx itself, which renewed ties with Buorth across the Far Sea. Abdazon, born of the House of Sorrow, at the Place of the Weeping Waters, had transmuted these tears into life-giving water which flowed outwards into its many tributaries. And the Hypogeum was contiguous with the Land of Men again for the first time since the Fall of Sad Ederron, cast into the sea.

It was in this time that Aszenju the Betrayer arose across the Ederren Mountains, somewhere in the Vast Desert. Some said he came from Old Qisuth, or from Sloath itself, deep in the faraway heart of the House of Silence. Wherever his origin lay, slowly but surely, he made his way towards the glittering jewel of the city of Abdazon.